APPLICANT'S ABSTRACT: Continuation of the Collaborative Alcohol-Related Longitudinal Project is proposed. The project has accumulated an archive consisting of the raw data from 40 longitudinal general population datasets and two adoptee studies from 18 countries (new data sets from other countries may soon be added to this data set). Continuation is based on using this unique resource to address 2 substantive domains of research. The first, "Social Change and Gender Roles," is an examination of cross-study variation in the prediction of gender-specific drinking patterns/problems. Nested contextual models will predict gender-specific drinking patterns/problems over time, within age cohorts and social contexts with the general hypothesis being that when individuals diverge with respect to their own traditionality/modernity from the trends of traditionality/modernity in their age cohort and/or their society, the probability of deviant drinking increases. Such analyses should illuminate understanding why one group in a society is less likely to drink heavily compared to another and to ask what is at the juncture of social change which contains variations in this theme. Thus, gender roles will be linked to social structure and to social change comparing different societies and/or periods of history. The second, "Tiered Research Syntheses of Drinking on Premature Mortality," uses meta-analysis to combine research results in longitudinal studies containing information on mortality, morbidity, and other health characteristics, as well as social characteristics. We aim to identify characteristics (subjective health, social class, social integration, and mental health) of abstainers that account for their excess mortality over moderate drinkers. These analyses will more carefully specify drinking pattern than in past studies by comparing multiple studies in tiered analyses and by examining the degree of cross-study homogeneity in results.